From Vision to Victory: Why OKRs Are Your Business's Missing Scorecard

Let me break down OKRs in simple terms. Objectives and Key Results - that's what OKR stands for - are basically a way to ensure everyone in your organization knows what success looks like and how to measure it.

Like a first serve percentage in tennis, the best business objectives are clear and measurable.

Think about tennis, which I've been passionate about since my early days. When you step onto the court, you have a clear objective: win the match. But how do you measure that before the final point? Your key results might be landing 70% of your first serves, winning 60% of net approaches, or maintaining an 80% success rate on break point opportunities. These aren't vague hopes - they're specific, measurable targets that tell you if you're winning throughout the match.

Let me give you a real business example from our Knightsbridge Capital portfolio. When we invested in our industrial solvent business, they needed sales + clarity. Their objective wasn't just "sell more" - that's too vague. Instead, they set specific key results: increase market share by 11%, 12 hour max in customer replies, and passing external audits with scores above 95%.

Here's why this matters: Most businesses fail not because they don't know what they want to achieve but because they can't translate big goals into daily actions. If you tell your team "increase shareholder value," that's meaningless to someone working in operations or customer service. But if you say "reduce customer wait times to under 2 minutes" or "cut defect rates to below 0.1%," now they know exactly what to do.

The key - and this is crucial - is that OKRs are designed to be ambitious. At Google, which famously uses this system, they aim to hit about 70% of their targets. If you're achieving 100% of your OKRs, you're not being aggressive enough. It's like a tennis player who only goes for safe shots - you'll never win Grand Slams playing it safe.

And here's what most people get wrong about OKRs: they treat them like a performance review tool. That's not the point. They're a communication tool. When done right, anyone in your organization should be able to look at your OKRs and understand exactly where the company is headed and how their work contributes to getting there.

Let me be direct: if you're running a business without OKRs or something similar, you're basically playing without a score keeper. You might know you want to win, but you have no way to track your progress during the match. In today's competitive environment, that's not just inefficient - it's dangerous.

Like a tennis court's clear lines, effective OKRs draw the boundaries between success and failure.

I've seen this play out countless times in our investments at Knightsbridge Capital. The companies that consistently outperform are the ones that have these clear measurement systems in place. It's not coincidental that some of the most successful companies in the world - Intel, Google, Amazon - all use variations of this system.

The beauty of OKRs is their simplicity. You don't need expensive consultants or complex software. You just need clarity about what you're trying to achieve and how you'll measure success. Everything else flows from there.

So, if you're not using OKRs, start. Today. Because in business, like in tennis, you can't improve what you can't measure, and you can't win if you don't know the score.